Quantile regression for mixed models with an application to examine blood pressure trends in China

Cardiometabolic diseases have substantially increased in China in the past 20 years and blood pressure is a primary modifiable risk factor. Using data from the China Health and Nutrition Survey, we examine blood pressure trends in China from 1991 to 2009, with a concentration on age cohorts and urbanicity. Very large values of blood pressure are of interest, so we model the conditional quantile functions of systolic and diastolic blood pressure. This allows the covariate effects in the middle of the distribution to vary from those in the upper tail, the focal point of our analysis. We join the distributions of systolic and diastolic blood pressure using a copula, which permits the relationships between the covariates and the two responses to share information and enables probabilistic statements about systolic and diastolic blood pressure jointly. Our copula maintains the marginal distributions of the group quantile effects while accounting for within-subject dependence, enabling inference at the population and subject levels. Our population-level regression effects change across quantile level, year and blood pressure type, providing a rich environment for inference. To our knowledge, this is the first quantile function model to explicitly model within-subject autocorrelation and is the first quantile function approach that simultaneously models multivariate conditional response. We find that the association between high blood pressure and living in an urban area has evolved from positive to negative, with the strongest changes occurring in the upper tail. The increase in urbanization over the last twenty years coupled with the transition from the positive association between urbanization and blood pressure in earlier years to a more uniform association with urbanization suggests increasing blood pressure over time throughout China, even in less urbanized areas. Our methods are available in the R package BSquare.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/15-AOAS841 in the Annals of Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Development and Implementation of a Flipped-Classroom Delivery in Engineering Computing and Analysis for First Year Engineering Students

University of Wollongong recently undertook a major restructure of its academic and professional units, after the appointment of a new Vice Chancellor in 2012. As a result, the previous 11 faculties have been merged and rationalised into five new faculties. The Faculty of Engineering and the Faculty of Informatics merged to become the Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences (EIS), consisting of six schools representing a total of 13 disciplines. Following the restructuring, EIS made the decision to develop a new common first year curriculum for all engineering undergraduate programs, spanning nine disciplines, they being; civil, mining, environmental, electrical, computer, telecommunications, mechanical, materials and mechatronic engineering. The process of developing the new first year subjects was undertaken in 2014 by a Task and Finish (T&F) group aiming for full implementation at the commencement of 2015. Through consultation with key stakeholders from each discipline area, as well as teaching teams from existing first year programs, five new engineering subjects were to be created, to coexist with the unaltered physics and mathematics subjects. The T&F group met regularly over the course of 2014, where they initially tasked with identifying the key mastery skills that all engineering students should have developed by the end of their first year of full time study. These skills were then grouped into themes, leading to the creation of the five new subjects. The final role of the T&F group was to report back to the Heads of School who would then assign key personnel to develop the curriculum content for each new subject. This paper will focus on the development of one of those newly created subjects, ENGG105 Engineering Computing and Analysis, which adopted the flipped-classroom approach to deliver the subject content

Inequality, material well-being, and subjective well-being: Exploring associations for children across 15 diverse countries

Children's material well-being, and the levels of wealth and inequality in societies within which children live, are important factors in determining outcomes. However, less is known about the extent to which these factors have an impact children's subjective well-being, especially in an internationally comparative context. This study draws on data from the Children's Worlds survey, an international study of child subjective well-being, to explore links between national level indicators of wealth and inequality (GDP and Gini coefficients), individual indicators of material well-being (the material resources children report having access to), and subjective well-being. The survey covers 15 diverse countries covering the continents of Europe, Asia, Africa and South America, with samples of at least 3000 per country, ages 8, 10 and 12. Analysis takes the form of a multilevel, varying intercepts and slopes model, examining the association between financial and material resources and inequality and subjective well-being across and between countries. Findings suggest that material resources that children report are significantly associated with subjective well-being, while indicators of financial resources and inequality at the national level are not. While a significant association between material resources and subjective well-being is found across the whole sample, the magnitude of this association, and the association between school- and country-level material resources, varies markedly. Within different countries, the strongest material resources-related predictor of overall subjective well-being may be either at the individual, school or country level

Detection and identification methods and new tests as developed and used in the framework of cost 873 for bacteria pathogenic to stone fruits and nuts

Xanthomonas arboricola pv. pruni (Xap), the causal agent of bacterial spot disease of stone fruits and almond, is regulated as a quarantine pathogen in the European Union and the European and Mediterranean Plant Protection Organization (EPPO). Xap can have an epiphytic phase and/or be latent and, consequently, it can be transmitted by different types of plant material. Effective quarantine measures require specific, sensitive and rapid methods to detect Xap in propagative material or new reservoirs. Laborious and time-consuming methods for the diagnosis of Xap are recommended in the current EPPO standard protocol. However, new several pathogen-specific PCR and quantitative realtime PCR assays have been developed that enable direct detection of Xap in symptomatic and symptomless plant samples. A concise resource of current methods for Xap detection and identification, based on assessment and development activities within the framework of COST 873, is presented

Particle growing mechanisms in Ag-ZrO2 and Au-ZrO2 granular films obtained by pulsed laser deposition

Thin films consisting of Ag and Au nanoparticles embedded in amorphous ZrO2 matrix were grown by pulsed laser deposition in a wide range of metal volume concentrations in the dielectric regime (0.08<x(Ag)<0.28 and 0.08<x(Au)<0.52). High resolution transmission electron microscopy (TEM) showed regular distribution of spherical Au and Ag nanoparticles having very sharp interfaces with the amorphous matrix. Mean particle size determined from X-ray diffraction agreed with direct TEM observation. The silver mean diameter increases more abruptly with metal volume content than that corresponding to gold particles prepared under the same conditions. Two mechanisms of particle growing are observed: nucleation and particle coalescence, their relative significance being different in both granular systems, which yields very different values of the percolation threshold (xc(Ag)~0.28 and xc(Au)~0.52).Comment: 6 figure

The role of scenario, deontic conditionals and problem content in Wason´s selection task

This paper was presented at "The European Conference on Cognitive Science. Siena, Italy, October 1999"This experiment explores the influence of thematic content, the presence or absence of a scenario and the use of deontic or indicative framing of conditional rules on performance on Wason’s selection task. Logical performance was affected by the content used (permission rules were the best, neutral the worst and obligation rules intermediate) and by the use of scenarios. The scenario effect interacted significantly with the problem framing such that the presence of a scenario facilitate performance only when problems were framed in a deontic rather than indicative manner. The presence of scenarios did not interact with the problem content. These results are discussed in terms of pragmatic influences on reasoning, within the framework of the Dual Process Theory (Evans & Over, 1996

Current status and perspectives of mollusc (bivalves and gastropods) culture in the Spanish Mediterranean

This is a review of the current status, problems and perspectives of bivalve and gastropod culture in the Spanish Mediterranean. Along this coast, bivalve culture has traditionally been located in the two Ebro Delta bays, and in the harbours of Valencia and Mahón, where the main species is the mussel. At present, the Mediterranean mussel Mytilus galloprovincialis Lamarck, 1819 culture is developing in Andalusia. Ostreid culture is currently limited to two species, the Japanese oyster Crassostrea gigas (Thunberg, 1793) in the bays of the Ebro Delta, and the European oyster Ostrea edulis L., 1758 in Santa Pola (Alicante). Cultures of the grooved carpet and Japanese carpet clams, Ruditapes decussatus (L., 1758) and Ruditapes philippinarum (Adamsampersand Reeve, 1850), are located only in the shallow areas of the Ebro Delta. In addition, beds of several species of clams and scallops are distributed along this coast, including the truncate donax Donax trunculus L., 1758, the striped venus Chamelea gallina (L., 1758), the tuberculate cockle Acanthocardia tuberculata (L., 1758) and the smooth callista Callista chione (L., 1758).En este trabajo se revisa la situación actual del cultivo de moluscos bivalvos y gasterópodos en el Mediterráneo español, analizando su problemática y sus perspectivas de futuro. De todo el litoral, el cultivo de moluscos se ha concentrado tradicionalmente en las dos bahías del delta del Ebro y en los puertos de Valencia y Mahón, con el mejillón Mytilus galloprovincialis Lamarck, 1819 como la especie de mayor producción, cuyo cultivo, recientemente, se está desarrollando con éxito en Andalucía. El cultivo de ostreidos se limita en la actualidad a dos especies: el ostrón Crassostrea gigas (Thunberg, 1793) en las bahías del delta del Ebro y la ostra plana Ostrea edulis L., 1758 en Santa Pola (Alicante). El cultivo de almejas Ruditapes decussatus (L., 1758) y R. philippinarum (Adamsampersand Reeve, 1850) se realiza en el delta del Ebro. Además, a lo largo del litoral mediterráneo español existen numerosos bancos naturales de coquina Donax trunculus L., 1758, chirla Chamelea gallina (L., 1758), corruco Acanthocardia tuberculata (L., 1758), almejón Callista chione (L., 1758) y varias especies de almejas y vieiras.Instituto Español de Oceanografí